One interesting point that probably deserves mention in the “What Happened to Web Development?” section is that JavaScript VM performance also increased impressively over the last decade, allowing it to be usable to do a variety of heavy-duty programming work that would have once been unthinkable on the web (as an aside, the details of how JavaScript VMs achieved these performance improvements are insane and impressive). These performance improvements have no doubt enabled the rise of client-side web applications (also called single-page applications), which push most of the once back-end website work to the client.

Yeah, great point. To keep the document to a reasonable size I decided to just hint at that here:

At some point the web collectively realized that the web standards known as HTML/CSS/JavaScript (and web browsers) had advanced to such a point that they were now beginning to seriously compete with applications